Condemned first as heretical, and then as nonsensical, ideas of deification had no place in the canon of the West's modernity, a tradition predicated on the exclusion of other ways of thinking about transcendence and how, on earth, we should live. But all the while, what became seen as "Western thought" was built upon two altars, of Greco-Roman classicism and Christian creed, both of which had men-becoming-gods at their centers.#6522•
Gods are born ex nihilo and out of lotuses, from the white blood of the sea-foam, or the earwax of a bigger god. They are also birthed on dining room tables and when spectacles of power are taken too far. They are born when men find themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time. Gods are made in sudden deaths, violent accidents; they ascend in the smoke of a pyre, or wait, in their tombs, for offerings of cigars.#2382•
Gods are made when language goes beyond its intentions. Occasionally, a god is born out of an excess of love. As the third-century theologian Origen wrote, in his commentary on the Song of Songs, "It should be known that it is impossible for human nature not always to love something." It is also impossible for human nature not to love too much.#2381•
Chapter 9
For the grooming of a god, the strict schedule began at five a.m.#6520•
It was a highly regimented existence, but as Besant would say, "Occultism is the most orderly thing in the world."#6519•
"There was a huge Roman Empire; but it was self-interest, the Roman peace, and the power of Rome which held that together.… But what else than love holds this Empire together? England, the little Mother State, has no wish to coerce it." Bound together by the tyranny of love, the empire was, above all, a family—in a theory that perhaps exposed Mrs.
Besant's history of belonging to especially dysfunctional, broken ones.
She wrote, "The genius of the Empire is to make every nation that you conquer feel that you bring them into the Imperial Family, that they and you from that time forward are brothers."#6515•